“Who is to determine whether the share exacted be an undue one? My own opinion is that the laborer’s share of results has grown larger, and the capitalist’s share smaller, during the last twenty years. At least, the rate of interest on money is not much more than half what it was before the war. But whether this be so or not it is not nature’s fault. Nature is not only implacably just, she is impartially generous. No suitor is denied the chance to gain her favors, and none is refused any favor he may have earned. There are floods and tornadoes, frosts and fevers, burning suns and chilling winds. Yet these, as well as the fruitage and the harvests, are the offspring of inexorable law, and science now interprets the law. It warns us of cyclones ten thousand miles away; it predicts the date of arrival, speed, and duration of hurricanes; it brings the ladybug from Australia to combat and destroy the scale-bug in California; it promises to conquer drought by exploding dynamite bombs in the air or by chemical production of rain; it restrains floods by diverting rivers; it destroys malarial germs by planting groves of eucalyptus; it analyzes soils; it selects seeds; it fertilizes with electric wires, and it ploughs and plants and harvests fields with iron-limbed and steam-lunged servants. A hundred years ago one man with spade and sickle slowly wrested from the earth the sustenance for his little household, with only sufficient surplus to scantily compensate the weaver, who, with hand loom, constructed a few yards of cloth between daylight and dark. Now a girl guides the spindles and shuttles and makes thousands of yards of cloth in a day, and the labor of one man industriously applied to so much land as he can advantageously cultivate with the aid of improved machinery, will in one year produce one thousand bushels of wheat, or their equivalent in agricultural products—enough to feed fifty men for a year.” “I grant you, doctor, that the production of wealth has greatly increased. The problem of the hour is how to provide for a more equal and just distribution of it.” “John, the solution of the problem is not difficult. Allow every man to have that which he earns, and compel every man to earn that which he has. Accord every man the opportunity to work or starve, with the assurance that for his work he will receive full value, and for his idleness a hunger that no public or private charity will alleviate. Hard labor and hard fare for the criminal, generous diet and tender care for the sick, an ax or a pump handle for the tramp, and allow no healthy man to eat his supper until he has earned it. Consider sporadic and indiscriminate charity as great an evil as injustice. Accord every man his dollar and demand from every man your dollar, and give and exact shilling for shilling. Emulate and copy the inexorable justice of nature.”